Protecting network operations infrastructure is one of the most critical job duties of an any IT operations manager. The best place to start such a large feat, and ultimately making your job and life much easier and less stressful, is procuring a strong NOC monitoring software. Often complicated tasks like monitoring devices coming and going from your network, to monitoring all traffic flooding your network and servers, having a NOC monitoring software puts all of the metrics you need to be concerned with in one place. Today we will look at those and other features to consider in your search for the best NOC monitoring software, no matter your company’s size or infrastructure.

Monitoring your network on the go

More and more professionals of all verticals, IT being no exception, are working remotely and crisscrossing the world in plane, trains and automobiles. Just because you are not sitting at your desk, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to see what is going on with your IT infrastructure at all times. Finding a software with a mobile or tablet friendly output can make a huge difference if you find yourself on the road often. Even more than being beneficial when you are traveling, having a tablet solution allows you to pull up your key metrics straight from your tablet while at home, not having to pull out your sometimes large laptop, log into it, etc; ultimately saving you valuable personal time and convenience. Many of the NOC monitoring software on the market today offers, iOS and Android solutions, making it tough to go wrong if you are often out of the office away from your main machine.

NOC configuration management

Network configuration management is an often overlooked, yet critical, feature to look at when researching NOC monitoring software. Throughout the day, your networks configuration is continually changing, creating a dangerous opening for threats to obtain access to your server and potentially cause harm to your IT operations and company as a whole. Having a configuration management feature allows for scheduling of configuration backups to boost your networking monitoring functions and ensure you are covered in the case of a network penetration. Typically, you will have these automatic backups run every, to ensure the next day you are starting safe, with little to no effort from you and your team. Having this feature will not only increase your overall safety from an IT infrastructure perspective, but also save you and your team valuable time.

Monitoring software custom alerts

When an issue inevitably does arise on your network, having customized preset alerts to notify you as soon as possible is a feature that you will strongly want to consider for a number of reasons. Whether the alerts come via SMS, email or from within the software itself, being able to react in near real-time to any incoming threat will help you immobilize and contain it as soon as possible, which is critical. Beyond security threats, receiving notifications for things like shrinking bandwidth are sometimes equally important, as low bandwidth can all but cripple your operations. If your company is one that constantly has employee devices (both personal and professional) coming on and off your network, receiving a notification as your bandwidth limit approaches can really make your job easier. Within the tool itself, you will also want to pinpoint exactly where the biggest bandwidth users are coming from.

Try out your NOC monitoring software first

It’s always good practice to try a free trial version of software you are considering an investment in, both to see if it’s a good fit and letting your employees try it out. This software should be no different, as it is one you will be using very often!

Finding an IT infrastructure management software with SAAS monitoring functionality is a critical tool that every IT operations team should want to have in its arsenal. SAAS (Service as a software) is at its core a model that mains central located license that are on a subscription basis. Normally accessed by an online browser or within a tool, SAAS is now a common aspect of managing many business applications such as AWS, Nagios and Solarwinds. SAS monitoring lets you gain real, useful information on all users your platform. That includes users that are behind your in-house firewall or outside connections. This information is then displayed to you in real-time, displaying data from interactions with all the SAAS applications in your infrastructure. Ultimately, SAAS monitoring allows you to recognize issues as soon as possible and minimize the effects they will have on your business.

Monitoring AWS Cloudwatch Activities

One of the biggest players in the SAAS platform industry is undoubtedly AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloudwatch. Finding a tool that has a connector for AWS can be a real game changer in keep your IT operations department running as efficiently as possible. A key component to AWS is their Data Pipeline, which lays out the work required to perform a task. Some of the most common activities you can expect are running Hive queries, moving large chunks of data from one location on your server to another, running custom Linux/Unix commands, running various scripts such as Pig, and one of the most common, running a SQL query against a database. With more and more companies using AWS or like-minded software, finding a SAAS monitoring solution that offers a connector, is something you should strongly consider in your search.

SAAS Monitoring on your dashboard

Having an intuitive and easy to decipher central dashboard is a critical feature for any software that will be displaying some of your IT operations team most important and critical metrics. You should find a tool that offers not only traditional but hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring, that has a dashboard that will display metrics from your SAAS monitoring solution, as well as internal sources (think Solarwinds, Nagios, bandwidth monitoring, SNMP monitoring, etc.). The easier to understand and master your dashboard is, the faster you can train new employees on the intricacies of it and how to interpret the metrics displayed.

SAAS Monitoring on the go

Whether you are looking at network monitoring tools or SAAS monitoring tools, you will want to consider a software that also offers a strong mobile/tablet display feature. Whether it’s its own app or just mobile browser friendly, having your day to day SAAs monitoring capabilities, as an example, can be a key metric that will allow for monitoring while traveling or out of the office. Especially if your IT operations is currently small in size, you’ll want the ability to personally handle any issues that arise, no matter where you are. Having a mobile version of your solution will also help you to respond quicker to alerts that come through when an issue arises. Getting an alert directly to your iPhone or Android can make all the difference in the world when you can quickly react to the issue, limiting downtime.

Demo-ing your SAAS Solution

As is good practice with most software you are considering an investment in, it’s worth checking out if your potential SAAS monitoring solution as a free demo version of the software before making the investment. This will not only allow you to see if it “plays nice” with your other software, but also let your team try it out and get their feedback on it.

At a high level, ITSM tools manage workflows of the various occurrences that become problems for your IT operations team. Everything from the managing of service requests, handling IT breaches, handling ticket requests, service desk related issues and the other litany of issues that that come through to your IT operations, can be handled effectively with the right set of ITSM tools. Specifically, for your service desk team, ITSM tools are great to help manage both employee and customer facing IT issues, ensuring that they are not only ultimately handled efficiently, but at a minimum addressed and responded to in a timely mater. ITSM tools are ideal for customer facing issues especially, allowing for the 24-hour service that some customers require, ensuring a great experience every time.

ITSM Tools for your help/service desk

If you are company that sells a product or provides a service, it’s no news to you that customer service is near the top of your list of priorities. Everything from managing the company website, to potentially technical issues with the service/product you are selling, often falls into the lap of a company’s IT operations team. Finding ITSM tools with strong help/service desk support is a great idea for an organization of any size or service type. Automatically keeping track of tickets submitted and being able to gather the preliminary information needed without lifting a finger, is big asset for any team. Information systems, third-party applications and on-prem information are all critical assets that you will want to track in a dashboard within your ITSM tool. Having an intuitive and easy to understand dashboard in any software, not just your ITSM tool, is an invaluable feature that will allow you to train new employees quickly to understand the software and use it at its full capability sooner rather than later.

ITSM Asset/License Management

Two features that most ITSM tools that will come with are the ability to manage the various assets and licenses in your enterprise. Asset management, allows you to keep track of manage from an IT perspective the various devices within your business and add-ons on your machines, throughout the time they are circulating your business. An employee’s company phone for example can be managed from the time they receive it, to when they leave or are terminated, and ultimately when the phone is cleaned and reassigned. Your ITSM tool will keep track of that devices lifecycle the entire time it remains within your business. Having a license management feature within your new tool will prove to be a great feature as well, as it allows you to keep track of license requirements and manage when they are expiring, or updates are coming. Keeping in formed of upcoming changes or renewals to licenses can be critical as when they expire unexpectedly, it can cause internal havoc to your company. If a license to a product your supply chain software uses everyday expires out of the blue for example, it can cause outages and downstream problems that can cost your company in more ways than one.

Free Trial of ITSM Tools

Just like when you are purchasing any new software your company is investing in, it’s good business practice to download a free trial version of the tool. Your ITSM tools should be no different and given the importance of the issues they are dealing with, it should be priority. When using the trial, it’s a good idea to see if it is compatible with your other suite of software, such as the ones you use for security. You will also want to ensure your power users of the tool, get priority in testing it out.

Providing Extensive workflow options to match your IT business practices

Bridging the gap between IT operations and the service helpdesk offering tight integration with ServiceNow, Zendesk, BMC Remedy, JIRA, Salesforce Service Cloud, ManageEngine and more.

Using event, entity and topology collection; correlation rules; and a library of configurable internal and external actions, RightITnow ECM makes it easy to automate IT operations processes. For example, with RightITnow ECM you can automatically escalate certain alerts to an ITSM system for incident (trouble ticket) creation. RightITnow ECM can be configured for closed-loop removal of alerts when linked incidents or trouble tickets are ‘closed’ in the underlying ITSM system. RightITnow ECM’s bi-directional automation of the event-to-alert-to-incident process plays a key role in optimizing IT operations and streamlining costs.

At it’s core, network alert software is a tool that helps keep your entire IT system running exactly the way it should. From providing security coverage, to creating and stashing logs, to customizable alerts and alarms, this tool will run in sync with your suite of other tools, keeping them out of harm and running efficiently as well. It also plays quarterback to your monitoring system as a whole, taking in all of the various data points from different sources, and displaying it in an easy to understand format to keep your network afloat. Whichever network alert software you decide to go with, make sure to stay in tune with the most recent firmware updates, which keep you in the loop with new features and the inevitable bug fixes. Staying up to date in the maintaining of the software, can be just as critical as using it in the first place.

Alert software dashboard interface

A good trait of any software, not just your network alert software, is one with a dashboard that is easy to use and intuitive. When it comes to managing your plethora of alerts and configuring your sometimes-intricate alarms, you’ll want user interface that is easy to use, and simple to understand. The world of IT is an industry with often times high turnover, so by having an easy to learn and adapt to dashboard, new employees will have little downtime when learning the system. This will ultimately help your bottom line, with employee training often times being expensive if the software you use is foreign. Another good feature in a dashboard is the ability to access it, cleanly, from a mobile interface, both smartphone and tablet. By having your tools most critical metrics and features with you in the palm of your hand, you can react real time to any issues or changes.

Network event logging

Mistakes by employees ultimately will inevitably happen. Often times when there is an error, finger pointing, or the blame game can take place, causing a litany of problems internally. By having a network alert software that logs events such as setting changes, or delays in response to an alarm, you can pinpoint who did (or didn’t) do what and react accordingly. Event logging keeps tracks of everything on your network, so in the event of a security breach or gap, you can quickly identify the source and proactively put the steps in motion to contain and fix it. If you do want to use this feature, it’s best practice to set up user profiles for each of your employees that will use it, so you can use it most effectively.

Alert priorities

While having alerts and alarms for everything is great, some alerts are just more important than others. A feature to consider in your search for the best network alert software for you needs, is a system that you can prioritize alerts so that only the most critical come to you directly. While a low bandwidth issue can definitely slow down business and cause some problems, a breach of your main frames security, where you have customers (or sometime patients) sensitive information on, is something you will want all hands-on deck on. An advanced sort and filter feature can help you choose those alerts that you want to see, as soon as they happen. You can also go the opposite way, having some of the most basic and fixable alerts go to a certain employee, so the rest of your team is not bothered and overwhelmed with every single alert.

IT service management tools at a high level are a system to manage the workflow of everything from handling IT incidents, managing service requests, enacting changes and overall just an easy way to deal with the plethora of problems that filter through to your IT operations team. It helps your service desk stay apprised to all the issues that come your way, keeping both your employees and if applicable customers have happy (and efficient) as possible. ITSM ticketing tools, specifically, are great for customer facing service tickets, as it they really put a focus on streamlining the ticketing workflow, to ensure a great experience whenever possible.

Help desk ticketing tools

Customer support is an often overlooked, yet increasingly critical aspect of any organization looking to separate from the pack no matter what industry they’re in. Finding a ticketing tool that makes your ticket tracking automated and helps ease the solving of customer support tickets can really set it apart and make your life easier. Combing important assets such as on-prem information, information systems, third party applications, self-service ticketing and workflow management all in the same intuitive, easy to use dashboard can help you and your support desk team remain at optimal efficiency.

Ticketing tools features

Macros are a feature that can help you quickly respond to issues you see often, with standard responses and actions that are preset. By having customized macros setup and in place, you can set in motion the appropriate actions every time you get one of those more common service requests. Custom views are another feature that lets your team see certain things, such as ticket status, assigned group, certain operational silos or other conditions, based on their role and need to see. Custom views will also allow you to set rules based on job code, so employees see only what they are allowed to. Another feature to consider in your search for ITSM ticketing tools, is customizable and dynamic customer support request forms. This will allow your help desk team to quickly obtain the right context when a ticket comes in, making their life easier and job more efficient. Many times, the more information the employee can get up front, the faster they will be able to respond to ultimately solve for the issue at hand. Having a ticketing tool that can schedule your company’s business hours, is an also a common feature that will make your life easier. This way, you can automatically coordinate your departments efforts, track time, and ensure the tickets are pushed to the right places at the right time.

ITSM Service Desk

Within the overall hierarchy of ITSM, is the Service Desk. It a Single Point of Contact (SPOC), which helps the communication flow between the end user and your IT operation staff. This ultimately benefits both the customer and company and is a great catalyst for ensuring all issues and malfunctions in a system or business are addressed efficiently and quickly. An ITSM Service Desk, similar to ITSM ticket tools, are all a part of an ITSM Suite which help link incident, service request, problem, change records, login requests and other configuration tasks together.

ITSM Trials

Whether you are considering one of the many ITSM Suite tools, or a software of another time, you should always look to see if a free trial version of the software the software is available. This will not only let you see if the tool can mesh with your suite of other tools, but also allow you and your team to get a feel of the tool before you acquire it officially.

Providing Extensive workflow options to match your IT business practices

Bridging the gap between IT operations and the service helpdesk offering tight integration with ServiceNow, Zendesk, BMC Remedy, JIRA, Salesforce Service Cloud, ManageEngine and more.

Using event, entity and topology collection; correlation rules; and a library of configurable internal and external actions, RightITnow ECM makes it easy to automate IT operations processes. For example, with RightITnow ECM you can automatically escalate certain alerts to an ITSM system for incident (trouble ticket) creation. RightITnow ECM can be configured for closed-loop removal of alerts when linked incidents or trouble tickets are ‘closed’ in the underlying ITSM system. RightITnow ECM’s bi-directional automation of the event-to-alert-to-incident process plays a key role in optimizing IT operations and streamlining costs.

At it’s core, incident management refers to the tasks and activities that a company identifies, analyzes and ultimately corrects, if they are determined to be hazardous. In most well-structured companies, incidents are commonly handled by an incident management team (IMT), Incident Command System (ICS) or an Incident Response Team (IRT). If a given incident isn’t dealt with properly with something such as a Remedy incident management system, business operations can be drastically disrupted, information security risked, and worst yet, customer’s experiences could be affected or brought to a screeching halt. The longer an incident is not managed properly, the more wide-spread the damage can become and be escalated to a crisis. Preventing the same incident from happening again is another key component of incident management that can not be forgotten.

Incident management systems software

The idea of having a tool like Remedy incident management system is to collect the incident report data that is often times time sensitive, in an organized, reliable and consistent way. A tool like that can most times also collect data in real time, allowing for each event and piece of data to be time stamped with the time and date it occurred. It will also automate the sending of notifications, escalate tasks and alerts to the appropriate people in your organization and even help prioritize the task or event, among other more customized criteria. Analysis reports are another feature of your incident management systems software that you will want to see if your prospective tool has. You can also cater your incident management tool to your specific industry, depending on your needs, while others can be used across many industries, such as the Remedy incident management system too.

Incident management system stages

The first state of a tool such as Remedy incident management system, is the identification and

recording. The idea of this state is to reliably record and acknowledge any disruptions to services provided by IT to it’s end users, often times the company’s customers. The next step in the process is to investigate and diagnose the incident. You can best do this by gathering and search all existing information to identify that possible solution to the incident or pattern of events. After an ultimate resolution is reached and recovery has taken place, the last step is closing the incident. Typically, the end user (customer) has about 10 days to respond to your notification of resolution if they for some reason are not satisfied with your outcome. Taking it a step further, after 10 days, the status of the incident will automatically change to Closed.

The Remedy Incident difference

The Remedy incident management system tool gives it’s users a competitive advantage for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it automates incident management processes which reduce the number of incidents seen, improves resolution durations and takes steps to reduce if not completely prevent future incidents of the same nature from happening again. It also gives the ultimate visibility into the critical connections between IT and business that are otherwise hard to keep track of. This along with other internal features allow for direct visibility into business infrastructure to help you prioritize what is and what isn’t important for your company’s strategic goals. Through ITIL CMDB visibility, minimal downtime thanks to root cause analysis features built in and the variety of intake options, your IT operations staff will be running more efficiently than ever. As with any software you are considering, you should consider obtaining a free trial version of the software to see if it’s one you can learn quickly and use immediately.

Providing Extensive workflow options to match your IT business practices

Bridging the gap between IT operations and the service helpdesk offering tight integration with ServiceNow, Zendesk, BMC Remedy, JIRA, Salesforce Service Cloud, ManageEngine and more.

Using event, entity and topology collection; correlation rules; and a library of configurable internal and external actions, RightITnow ECM makes it easy to automate IT operations processes. For example, with RightITnow ECM you can automatically escalate certain alerts to Remedy for incident (trouble ticket) creation. RightITnow ECM can be configured for closed-loop removal of alerts when linked incidents or trouble tickets are ‘closed’ in Remedy. RightITnow ECM’s bi-directional automation of the event-to-alert-to-incident process plays a key role in optimizing IT operations and streamlining costs.

Splunk is a big data tool that captures, stores and correlates data in real-time and in a form that you can search for specific pieces of that data. It also generates everything from dashboards, various visual outputs, and alerts. Given the high volume of data that Splunk takes in, a critical piece of the tool it’s analyzation capabilities and ability to set up Splunk alerts, which will help you monitor events in real-time as they happen. Let’s dive into those alerts a bit deeper and see what they can offer you and your company, no matter the size or industry if your business.

Creating real-time alerts

One of the best kind of Splunk alerts you can set up is a per result alert, which triggers alerts to you and your team anytime a certain pattern of events happens. It can be critical in identifying trends and when you schedule them you can save valuable network resources. You can also set up “windows” of time, that give you intervals of say 10 minutes for example, to look for pattern for events. This is another good method if you are limited on resources.

Scheduled alerts

Another form of Splunk alerts to be aware of are scheduled alerts. In scheduled Splunk alerts, you can track things such as an error during a Splunk instance and get pushed an email alert if there are more say 10 errors in a twelve-hour window of time. You can schedule this same alert to say every day at the same time, depending on when your networks and servers see the most action over them. You can also trigger the email alert if the search has more than say seven results. You can have the emails come daily, at the time of the event, or get a weekly email detailing results. Email alerts can be a great feature because you can stay up to date around the clock, just by checking your email.

Custom field Splunk alert

As you get comfortable with Splunk and its functionalities, you need to define what exact criteria you’ll be looking for when it comes to everything from security to bandwidth. Whether you have an in-house app developer or use a third party, you’ll want to make sure the custom Splunk alerts are configurable by you and your staff. The alerts and rules you set are only as good you understand them, and more importantly can react to them. You can also convert a custom script into a Splunk alert action, customizing the alert to your company and the specific events that you normally see. Those scripts can come via SQL, or various other programming languages.

Splunk dashboards and alerts method

Whether you choose to get your alerts via email or within your dashboard, you’ll want to make sure your system is intuitive and one you can pick up quickly. Make sure your staff is trained to recognized alerts and what to do with them, so you can neutralize or react to anything that comes your way. Another increasingly popular way to get alerts is via SMS, which allows true around the clock and mobile reaction times. Many tools and resources now also offer a mobile version of their tool, which is great for those on the go professional or those that work remote. Downloading a trial demo version of any software you are considering is good practice, and the one that handles your Splunk alerts should be no different.

The safe keeping of your company’s files and internal systems is one of the most critical components of any IT department’s annual strategy. With hundreds to thousands of individual events flooding your networks and servers every day, you’ll want to ensure that you are equipped with the best possible event correlation engine to fit your company’s specific needs. While the search for the best software to fit your needs both presently and as your company grows may be monotonous and meticulous, today we look at some features to consider in your search for the tool that will keep your company running efficiently.

An event correlation engine essentially makes sense of a large number of actions and seemingly random events coming in large volumes. It consolidates and correlates events from various monitoring systems ,log files or directly from the devices and applications themselves.
the event correlation facility analyzes the relationships between the underlying devices and those seemingly random events, looking for patterns that could potentially cause harm to your networks and servers.
Once the events or patterns or events are tagged by your event correlation engine, you can then take the necessary action to isolate and contain them and move towards eliminating them if you so choose.
You can also take the necessary steps to ensure that they do not repeat themselves in the future.

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One of the most important attributes to any software you are investing in, and definitely a strong event correlation engine, is one with an intuitive dynamic main dashboard that you and your employees can pick up quickly and use regularly. When a software is easy to learn, you limit the amount of time you will ultimately have to train new employees. This can be a critical feature of the software when you consider the typically high turnover that we face in the IT world. Another thing to consider with a great main dashboard is it will also help you and your team quickly and easily track some of your departments most critical metrics.

As your company grows and size and importance, an attack over your network will eventually happen. It’s never the attack itself that matters as much, but more so a company’s preparation and ability to respond to the effects when it does. Quickly determining the who, what, how when and where is something that any good event correlation engine should be able to help with as soon as the attack occurs and the days that follow. While your event logs will have the details, an automated event correlation feature will help you put the pieces together in almost real time. In traditional IT departments, a team of security “experts” would have been left to put the puzzle together, spending many man hours determining what ultimately happened.

Another attribute you’ll want to consider in your event correlation engine is the ability to setup custom rules, to focus on the specific events you choose to and ultimately allow you to make sense out of all the various events that happen over your networks.

As previously mentioned, picking the best event correlation engine for your company’s needs is a very personalized and company specific decision. While the features mentioned today are important, they should be used as a starting point as you explore the software in depth. One thing you should always consider, really for any software you are considering an investment in, is a free trial version of the software. This will not only let you see if it’s a software you can learn quickly, but also test the compatibility with your other software and your staff’s competence.

It operations are quickly becoming the backbone to every successful company. Keeping an eye on the different platforms inside of your IT department that need monitoring on various levels, will set you apart as a distinguished leader. No matter the size of your company and your IT budget, you will find that an investment in monitoring software, whether it be for your applications or distributed network monitoring capabilities, will pay for itself over and over. The aforementioned distributed network monitoring allows you and your team to dull out monitoring over several instances for various reasons. Those reasons include but are not limited to, network location, security of your key data, availability of independent and separate locations, and last but certainly not least, overall performance of your local and remote machines. Knowing what to exactly look for in a distributed network monitoring software can be time consuming and confusing, so today let us look at some of the more important features to consider.

The aesthetics of a software are often overlooked yet can prove to be critical when it comes to the software being effective and useful from day one. The distributed network monitoring software you are considering should be no different and you should search for a software that falls under this category as well. By having a software you can pick up and use day one, you can account for the constant turnover that you phase in the IT operations field, cutting down on costly training sessions for new staff. If the software is difficult to navigate, the lag in use and difficulty picking it up can prove to be dangerous as the downtime can create a risk to network safety and overall efficiency.

We now operate our IT infrastructures in a world that is increasingly mobile. Having the ability in your distributed network monitoring software to use and operate on the go, can really set the software apart from it’s competitors. Having a mobile and tablet friendly software as well will help your team work on the go, or even more efficiently on the go than software that is restricted to just a desktop version. With many IT professionals now choosing to work remotely, this might be a feature you will want to strongly consider.

Integration with the Nagios environment is a critical feature in a distributed network monitoring software that you should strongly consider. Having this will also allow you to scale to the large infrastructure you will be migrating to. Building your distributed network monitoring solution is a mute point however if you are not doing it for the correct reasons. Taking advantage of the scheme with Nagios for example to report back results of monitoring local tasks is something to consider during your setup. The configuration you establish at the initial jump is critical in making sure you set yourself and the software up for success from day one moving forward.

Plain and simple, a software is only as good the results you see and incidents you can prevent. One of the ways to limit, if not eliminate, such events is having pre-determined alerts to notify you and your team of any incoming threats. These alerts can be setup to notify you via text or email, all hours of the day or night, so that you or someone on your team can take the steps necessary to limit the damage of say an incoming security threat.

The software you ultimately go with should be vetted and tested before you make your investment. Downloading a free demo version of the software you are considering is good practice and will allow you to have all relevant information when making your choice.